Notion will hold anything you build. Red Urchin already knows what today should look like.
Refined with tens of thousands of users since 2011
Notion is a remarkable piece of software. It is a construction kit: databases, documents, wikis and views, assembled however you like. People run whole companies in it.
That flexibility is also the trade. With Notion you are the architect — and the maintenance is yours too. Red Urchin is the opposite proposition: an opinion, already built, that you are not expected to modify.
| Red Urchin | Notion | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get on day one | A working system — open it and start typing | An empty page, or someone else's template |
| Setup | None | Hours, and it is never quite finished |
| Prioritising | A/B priority with automatic renumbering, built in | Whatever property you create, sorted however you configure |
| What it hands you | The single next thing to do, in bold | Whatever your view is filtered to show |
| Daily page | One per date, automatically, forever | You build it, or install a template that builds it |
| Follow-ups from meetings | Written onto the right day's page automatically | A relation between databases, if you set one up |
| Unfinished work | Automatic forwarding to a date you choose | A filter, or manual triage |
| Free tier | None — 14-day trial, card required | Yes, and generous for one person: unlimited pages and blocks |
| Price | $12/month or $125/year, one plan | Free · Plus $10/user/month annual ($12 monthly) · Business $20/user/month annual |
| Docs, wikis, notes | Notes pages, deliberately simple | Best in class |
| Team use | Single user, with delegation and “due from others” | Excellent — shared workspaces, permissions, comments |
| Drift over time | Cannot drift — there is nothing to reconfigure | Systems tend to decay unless maintained |
Prices and plan limits checked 17 August 2026. We have tried to be accurate and fair; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
The honest way to put it: Notion is a better product than Red Urchin by almost any measure of capability. It is also the reason a lot of people spend more time building their system than using it.
If you have the appetite to build and maintain something bespoke, build it in Notion. If you want to be handed a method that fifteen years of use has already argued about on your behalf, that is what we are for.
No charge for 14 days. Cancel any time before it ends.